“The author is cheating the reader as soon as he writes for the sake of filling up paper,” 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer admonished in contemplating the ethics of authorship. A century and a half later, Susan Sontag opined that true literature “is actually just this little tiny percentage of what is produced in book form.” This is perhaps even more true today, when publishers churn out a barrage of books that could’ve been, should’ve been, or once were magazine articles — listicles, even — artificially fattened into book heft like a foie gras duck and no more pleasurable to the reader than the feeding is to the duck.

Thirty-four-year-old Walter Benjamin presaged and parodied this phenomenon in a short list under the heading “Principles of the Weighty Tome, or How to Write Fat Books” in his 1928 treatise One-Way Street — a collage of fragmentary observations of everyday life and records of his dreams — in a section titled “Teaching Aid.” Found in his indispensable Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (public library) — which also gave us his 13 commandments of writing — the fragment reads like irreverent meta-commentary on the fact that One-Way Street was far from a “weighty tome,” but also stands as a tragicomic blueprint to producing that prototypical artificially fattened article-turned-book, not to mention the padded, paginated, filler-content articles that plague the modern web.

The whole composition must be permeated with a protracted and wordy exposition of the initial plan.

Terms are to be included for conceptions that, except in this definition, appear nowhere in the whole book.

Conceptual distinctions laboriously arrived at in the text are to be obliterated again in the relevant notes.

For concepts treated only in their general significance, examples should be given; if, for example, machines are mentioned, all the different kinds of machines should be enumerated.

Everything that is known a priori about an object is to be consolidated by an abundance of examples.

Relationships that could be represented graphically must be expounded in words. Instead of being represented in a genealogical tree, for example, all family relationships are to be enumerated and described.

A number of opponents all sharing the same argument should each be refuted individually.

The typical work of modern scholarship is intended to be read like a catalogue. But when shall we actually write books like catalogues? If the deficient content were thus to determine the outward form, an excellent piece of writing would result, in which the value of opinions would be marked without their being thereby put on sale.

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